Spent two weeks advertising on LinkedIn. Got 10 clicks and zero signups. Roast us.
Usethatapp.com is a marketplace for web apps. A developer lists an app; we take auth, payments, licensing, merchant-of-record and chargebacks off their plate. A buyer opens it in a browser. We've been live three months with no customers and no developers.
In June we ran a two-week LinkedIn campaign aimed at people building apps with AI, pitching them on listing with us. Results: 5,438 impressions, 10 clicks, 0.2% CTR, no reactions, no comments, two page views, zero followers gained. Our company page has 3 followers and 9,606 lifetime organic impressions.
My instinct was to file that as a total failure and go start over somewhere else. I don't think that's right, and here's my reasoning.
The CTR is a real measurement. At 5,438 impressions the 95% interval around 0.18% runs from roughly 0.07% to 0.3%, so we're under the ~0.4-0.6% usually quoted as typical for LinkedIn sponsored content. Something about that ad, or the audience we pointed at, failed.
The zero conversions measures nothing at all. Ten clicks with no signups is consistent with a 20% conversion rate — with zero events in ten trials the upper bound sits near 30%. We have no evidence the site is the problem. But, we also have no data about the site.
My read on the failure: we sold plumbing to people who haven't had a leak. Right now, Merchant-of-record and entitlement management are just a few prompts with an agent in development. Post success, it's a major headache when you're trying to focus on growth and improvement. Most people building with AI right now are upstream of those problems — they're trying to get a first user, not a compliant one. And we made that argument from a page with three followers, which is its own counterargument.
So the question. Is it wrong to stop advertising entirely and go recruit 20-30 developers by hand until the thing looks inhabited? That's where we're leaning. We don't have a good answer for where those developers are beyond this forum, which is part of why we're here. If you've done the manual half of a marketplace cold start, I'd like to know how you found the first cohort and what you had to offer them before you had anything to show.
usethatapp.com if you want to look at it and tell me it's the site that's the problem.
The breakdown between what the campaign actually measured and what it didn’t is unusually honest. Curious what you hear from the first few developers you approach directly.